Neenah Soccer Club has found a unique way to help the youth athletes they serve to internalize PCA principles. In 2016, NSC launched an essay contest to help players understand what their coaches learn in the Double-Goal Coach^® workshops they attend and the ways those workshops are supposed to affect how coaches coach.

NSC President Marti Coan hopes the contest will tie together both academic and athletic elements of success, contributing to the organization’s development of Better Athletes, Better People:

(The contest) plants the seed of PCA in our athletes, and we’re not making it a one-off event. It takes time for that culture to hold. We’ll continue to push the writing contest because we can continue to educate and inform our players on what it means to be a Double-Goal Coach.

NSC incentivizes players to participate by offering the chance to win a $100 Gift Card to Dick’s Sporting Goods, while also earning a $50 card for the coach who is the subject of the essay. All essay writers  receive a Neenah Soccer Club supporters scarf.

Essays are judged using the Hawkins rubric for opinion writing, the same standard used for fourth-graders in the area’s public schools. Each essay writer also received a review from contest judges, complete with explanations of spelling and grammar errors. Here is the essay by Ashley Zachor:

The contest is just the latest of Coan’s efforts that earned her the NSCAA Lifetime Service award at the organization’s national convention in January, 2017. Coan has served on the NSCAA board of directors since 1990, remarkable considering she did not play soccer as a child. “I only began coaching in the ‘80s because I had a daughter who wanted to play,” she said. “Once I took an active role, I knew I could do more for the kids in my area, and now I have the pleasure of working with soccer coaches all over the United States.”

Neenah Soccer Club plans to continue its PCA partnership in April with a Second-Goal Parent^® and Triple-Impact Competitor^® workshop.